Finally some 2013 work! And it’s only March… 🙂 so this term is all about knitting. Contrary to expectations, I have not been enjoying it as much as I did the weaving. I thought the three-dimensional aspect would really grab me, but there is something about weaving that ‘clicked’ in a way that knitting hasn’t (yet?). But anyway, to briefly outline what I was up to here, for this six-week project we were to imagine designing for a high end London store (I chose Dover Street Market) and choose a theme: Origami, Botanical or Contemporary Architecture. I chose Origami. I decided I wasn’t too interested in paper cranes and explored tessellations instead – modifying a flat paper surface into a relief pattern. I found all sorts of interesting artists/designers to be inspired by: Marcela Abal & Maria Ines Payssé (the original link to their interview on Spot On Textiles seems not to be functioning at present, but there are many images of their work on various blogs), Anna O’Neill, Ichiro Suzuki, Eric Gjerde, Fred Butler, Issey Miyake to name but a few. I highly recommend http://www.pleatfarm.com if you are interested in folded things! The Orinuno title was suggested by my friend Haruka, when I asked her if a Japanese term for folded fabric might exist, to go with Origami for folded paper.

From my paper models I worked through drawings to develop 4 knitted fashion fabrics. I used a fine gauge domestic machine to produce all of them, as partial knitting seemed the best way to produce the highly textured surfaces that emulated the paper models I started off with, and would not have been possible (at my level of knowledge anyway) on a V-bed machine.

The final presentation

Moodboard

Side view – I decided to fold my presentation boards and quite like the effect

The fabric was inspired by the work of Marcela Abal & Maria Ines Paysse

I went all out with this one and embedded the paper tessellations in the knitting. It involved some careful measuring to size the final piece from the sample, as the base fabric is mostly lycra it shrank by about half of its original size!

Slightly less crazy, I think this could be a nice trim or placement detail on a garment

This one was knitted in four pieces. The distorted surface comes from seaming together the edges of the pieces, which had a kind of zigzag shape to start out with. I think this is my least favourite as it probably needed more development to refine the idea.

Different perspective

Detail of how the paper sits in the fabric

So that was my first foray into designing some knitting and working on the domestic machines. Please let me know what you think, and if you have a similar project or some inspirational artists you know of, please share! Again, the colours in these pics are not great due to the studio lighting. I felt quite lost with this project and a little tortured by it at first, but sometime in the last week or two I settled into it and quite enjoyed producing the final four fabrics. I think they’re definitely in keeping with the character of my work in general – not necessarily pretty, but some interesting details I think. And I’ve learned a lot.